TEENAGE DREAMS, AND FAME AS NIGHTMARE
Got to like the dedication of the Southwark: to mark its smaller-space manufacturing of Samantha Hurley’s New York play a few demented teenage fan, it lined the cubicles within the toilet with posters of the sulky baby-face of Maguire, and Spiderman fanzine covers. Once you enter The sq. three-sided area an additional explosion of Tobeyiana hits you, with fairylights. On the ground large woolly rugs, on the cabinets toys enjoying a hand-puppet fantasy of a Mermaid King and a princess. It’s a teenage basement den , a jail of longing and unattainable need.
It will remind anybody of being 14, although fandom appears to have turned wilder since my buddy Katy and I fantasised about stowing away in Paul McCartney’s trunk on his American tour (such was our innocence we had no concept what we anticipated on rising). In this case Shelby – performed with terrifying ferocity by Tessa Albertson – has learn KIDNAPPING FOR DUMMIES and efficiently captured Maguire – Anders Hayward – and handcuffed him to a pipe. There are references to the darkish thriller MISERY, and when Shelby seems in tatty bridewear at full shriek, mouth Munch-open, the fear is so excessive that for some time I reckoned this was a nightmare of the sufferer’s. Not so. He thinks at first it’s a delusion whereas recovering from dental anaesthesia and medicines in his system, then that it’s a prank of his supervisor or agent’s. Shelby alternatively is simply hellbent on proudly owning him, as self-defined president of his fan membership. It takes a laser shock to make him say “I do”, and none of his resistance dents her dedication.
The play runs strong at 110 minutes, and will effectively be trimmed: however New York beloved it, the gamers are remarkably good and Tyler Struble’s route fluent and filled with small surprises. The conversations, conflicts and doubts each side are sometimes very humorous, however its benefit is in permitting pathos and a rounded, stroppy sense of rising character to Shelby : uncared for fatherless baby of a QVC-addicted mom, bullied at her faculty and its Prom. There’s subtlety too in an exquisite efficiency by Hayward as her captive. Just as her half-grown Cosmopolitan-magazine mentality is usually dented by saving streaks of realism, his horror and disbelief is tempered by consciousness that he had already been trapped by his fame, and by the thousand interviews and biographies which create him as a dream persona. When she finds out a number of the interviews had been nonsense she shouts “You’re not MY Tobey Maguire!!” And he has to agree. “Fame is very sticky, it gets all over you”.
The third determine, often, is Kyle Birch, large-scale and comedically rresistible, who seems within the wall as a type of inside Tobey who doesn’t purchase his stardom in any respect, generally as an invisible shouting mom upstairs, and at last as a really pleasing nightmare grotesque : a realtor come to measure and promote the home. Meanwhile Tobey by some means escapes and reappears irritably attempting to get out of his Spiderman go well with. A sharper, earlier ending would have made it a greater play. But you possibly can’t discover fault with the forged. Especially Hayward, who I hadn’t seen on stage earlier than, and far hope to see once more.
southwarkplayouse.co.uk to 10 August
